Memories of a Marriage Read Online Free Page A

locutions, all three of us, Lucy, Thomas, and I, belonged to the same world, undifferentiated by class, the grand world to which presidents of Harvard University traditionally welcomed at commencements graduating Harvard College seniors: “the society of educated men and women.” Buoyed by these sentiments, I asked Thomas and Lucy to come to a little cocktail party I was giving at my apartment on Friday of that same week.
    I had been living long enough in Paris to become friends with an interesting group of French literary and artistic types, whom I was sure Lucy would like, including a couple of fine music and art critics—and had invited a number of them, as well as some Americans working for the
New York Times
, the
Herald Tribune
, and
Time
. The French and the Americans didn’t make much of an effort to mix, but that was par for the course. I kept an eye on Thomas. At first he remained at Lucy’s side, but eventually American journalists who crowded to speak to her in effect shoved him aside. I was about to go to his rescue when I saw that no intervention was needed. He was chatting away with Guy Seurat, the great-grandson of the postimpressionist painter and my best friend in France. I joined them briefly and found Thomas’s French a bit stiff but perfectly sufficient. When I next checked,Guy was introducing him to an editor at Gallimard and his Sorbonne-professor wife. It was a good thing, I thought, that he had connected with the French contingent. Several of the American guests had a history with Lucy. There was no way Thomas could have known that, unless she had chosen to tell him, but such things can sometimes be inferred from the way a man takes your measure, and they hurt.
    Sometime before summer I ran into Lucy at a reception at the British embassy. It was a beautiful mild evening. We left at the same time, and when she told me she was going home, I suggested that we walk together. I would leave her at her door and continue to rue de Vaugirard. There is no greater or more exhilarating public space or urban view than that offered by the astonishing ensemble of place de la Concorde, the bridge that crosses the Seine and takes you to the National Assembly, and the vista of Notre-Dame to the east and Pont Alexandre III and the Trocadéro to the west. For a while we savored it in silence. Then she told me that she and Thomas would tour Italy together as soon as he had finished his army service. Her brother was getting married in Bristol on the second Saturday of September. Of course, she’d be there. After the wedding, she’d probably return to Paris. She hoped I’d be there.
    I observed that it seemed as though she and that very nice Thomas had something serious going.
    He really loves me, she answered. I think he needs me. Perhaps I need him too.
    ·   ·   ·
    A novel of mine was published in the United States in February of the following year, making it necessary for me to go to New York to see my editor and various public relations people at the publishing house, as well as my agent, and do some readings and other promotional events. It was good to get away from Paris. The conflict over the future of Algeria was tearing France apart with a vehemence not known since the Dreyfus Affair. Toward the end of my stay, invited by the Harvard College literary magazine, I gave a talk at the Sanders Theater in Cambridge. The turnout was good, and the audience agreeably enthusiastic. Unbeknownst to me, Thomas had come to hear me and waited to say hello as I left the building on the way to a reception the undergraduates were giving at the magazine. I invited him to come along. On our way to Bow Street, he gave me an enthusiastic, even bubbly, account of his and Lucy’s Italian tour. They had “done” Florence and the Umbrian towns, Venice, Padua, and Rome and then, after a two-day visit to Naples, drove back to Paris, where they parted. He took the train to Le Havre, from which his student ship was sailing.